The cloud-storage war continues with Dropbox’s acquisition of Readmill

Readmill, the popular reading and sharing app, has been acquired by Dropbox as the storage company scrambles to find an answer to rival Box’s recently unveiled Box View, a feature that shows people views of uploaded Microsoft Office and PDF files.

As reported by VentureBeat earlier this week from the BoxDev conference, the cloud-storage company announced Box View, which chief executive Aaron Levie revealed had been built off the technology of Crocodoc, a company Box acquired in May that’s pretty similar to Readmill. Presumably, Dropbox will attempt to go down the same path with Readmill as Box did with Crocodoc, tapping the underlying technology and talent pool to create their own version of live view document reader.

Dropbox will shut down Readmill as part of the deal, with the 11-person team, including founders Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud, joining the cloud company, a move that points toward the possible intentions behind the deal.

In a lengthy “epilogue” on its website, Readmill’s staff explained some of their thinking behind the move and gave detailed instructions to Readmill users on how to migrate their books and data to former competitors’ platforms, which they will be able to do until July 1.

“Readmill’s story ends here. Many challenges in the world of ebooks remain unsolved, and we failed to create a sustainable platform for reading. For this, we’re deeply sorry. We considered every option before making the difficult decision to end the product that brought us together,” reads a part of the statement.

Readmill, which is based in Berlin, has high-level information on what, and how much, its customers read over the course of the three years the company was active. Users have read a total of 560,797 hours through the app, with the most devoted reader accounting for a whopping 1,503 hours out of that total (roughly 62 days of nonstop reading).

The three most popular books among users are: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

More information:

Dropbox is the home for your most important stuff—now we’re bringing it to life with a growing family of products. Today, over 300 million people across every continent rely on Dropbox to get stuff done. With offices around the wor... read more »

Readmill is a curious community of readers, highlighting and sharing the books they love. Reading should be an open and easily shareable experience. Readmill is built to help fix the somewhat broken world of ebooks, and create the best... read more »